This thesis describes the implementation of automatic shot boundary detection algorithms for the detection of cuts and gradual transitions in digital video sequences. The objective was to develop a fully automatic video segmentation system as a pre-processing step for video database retrieval management systems as well as other applications which has large video sequences as part of their systems. For die detection of cuts, we begin by looking at a set of baseline algorithms that look into measuring specific features of video images and calculating the dissimilarity of the measures between frames in the video sequence. We then propose two different approaches and compare them against the set of baseline algorithms. These approaches are themselves built upon the base set of algorithms. Observing that the baseline algorithms initially use hard thresholds to determine shot boundaries, we build Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves to plot the characteristics of the algorithms when varying the thresholds. In the first approach, we look into combining the multiple algorithms in such a way that as a collective, the detection of cuts are improved. The results of the fusion are then compared against the baseline algorithms on the ROC curve. For the second approach, we look into having adaptive thresholds for the baseline algorithms. A selection of adaptive thresholding methods were applied to the data set and compared with the baseline algorithms that are using hard thresholds. In the case of gradual transition detection, an application of a filtering technique used to detect ramp edges in images is adapted for use in video sequences. The approach is taken by starting with the observation that shot boundaries represent edges in time, with cuts being sharp edges and gradual transitions closely approximating ramp edges. The methods that we propose reflect our concentration on producing a reliable and efficient shot boundary detection mechanism. In each instance, be it for cuts or gradual transitions, we tested our algorithms on a comprehensive set of video sequences, containing a variety of content and obtained highly competitive results.

Many applications require storage and indexing of new kinds of data in main-memory, e.g. color histograms, textures, shape features, gene sequences, sensor readings, or financial time series. Even though, many domain index structures were developed, very a few of them are implemented in any database management system (DBMS), usually only B-trees and hash indexes. A major reason is that the manual effort to include a new index implementation in a regular DBMS is very costly and time-consuming because it requires integration with all components of the DBMS kernel. To alleviate this, there are some extensible indexing frameworks. However, they all require re-engineering the index implementations, which is a problem when the index has third-party ownership, when only binary code is available, or simply when the index implementation is complex to re-engineer. Therefore, the DBMS should allow including new index implementations without code changes and performance degradation. Furthermore, for high performance the query processor needs knowledge of how to process queries to utilize plugged-in index. Moreover, it is important that all functionalities of a plugged-in index implementation are correct. The extensible main memory database system (MMDB) Mexima (Main-memory External Index Manager) addresses these challenges. It enables transparent plugging in main-memory index implementations without code changes. Index specific rewrite rules transform complex queries to utilize the indexes. Automatic test procedures validate the correctness of them based on user provided index meta-data. Moreover, the same optimization framework can also optimize complex queries sent to a back-end DBMS by exposing hidden indexes for its query optimizer. Altogether, Mexima is a complete and extensible platform for transparently index integration, utilization, and evaluation.

Proteomics is the science of understanding the dynamic protein content of an organism's cells (its proteome), which is one of the largest current challenges in biology. Computational proteomics is an active research area that involves in-silico methods for the analysis of high-throughput protein identification data. Current methods are based on a technology called tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) and suffer from low coverage and accuracy, reliably identifying only 20-40% of the proteome. This dissertation addresses recall, precision, speed and scalability of computational proteomics experiments. This research goes beyond the traditional paradigm of analyzing MS/MS experiments in isolation, instead learning priors of protein presence from the joint analysis of various systems biology data sources. This integrative `systems' approach to protein identification is very effective, as demonstrated by two new methods. The first, MSNet, introduces a social model for protein identification and leverages functional dependencies from genome-scale, probabilistic, gene functional networks. The second, MSPresso, learns a gene expression prior from a joint analysis of mRNA and proteomics experiments on similar samples. These two sources of prior information result in more accurate estimates of protein presence, and increase protein recall by as much as 30% in complex samples, while also increasing precision. A comprehensive suite of benchmarking datasets is introduced for evaluation in yeast. Methods to assess statistical significance in the absence of ground truth are also introduced and employed whenever applicable. This dissertation also describes a database indexing solution to improve speed and scalability of protein identification experiments. The method, MSFound, customizes a metric-space database index and its associated approximate k-nearest-neighbor search algorithm with a semi-metric distance designed to match noisy spectra. MSFound achieves an order of magnitude speedup over traditional spectra database searches while maintaining scalability. / text

The past few years have brought a major surge in the volumes of collected data. More and more enterprises and research institutions find tremendous value in data analysis and exploration. Big Data analytics is used for improving customer experience, perform complex weather data integration and model prediction, as well as personalized medicine and many other services. Advances in technology, along with high interest in big data, can only increase the demand on data collection and mining in the years to come. As a result, and in order to keep up with the data volumes, data processing has become increasingly distributed. However, most of the distributed processing for large data is done by batch processing and interactive exploration is hardly an option. To efficiently support queries over large amounts of data, appropriate indexing mechanisms must be in place. This dissertation proposes an indexing and query processing framework that can run on top of a distributed computing engine, to support fast, interactive data explorations in data warehouses. Our data processing layer is built around bit-vector based indices. This type of indexing features fast bit-wise operations and scales up well for high dimensional data. Additionally, compression can be applied to reduce the index size, and thus utilize less memory and network communication. Our work can be divided into two areas: index compression and query processing. Two compression schemes are proposed for sparse and dense bit-vectors. The design of these encoding methods is hardware-driven, and the query processing is optimized for the available computing hardware. Query algorithms are proposed for selection, aggregation, and other specialized queries. The query processing is supported on single machines, as well as computer clusters.

Satellite imagery research used to be an expensive research topic for companies and organizations due to the limited data and compute resources. As the computing power and storage capacity grows exponentially, a large amount of aerial and satellite images are generated and analyzed everyday for various applications. Current technological advancement and extensive data collection by numerous Internet of Things (IOT) devices and platforms have amplified labeled natural images. Such data availability catalyzed the development and performance of current state-of-the-art image classification and cross-modal models. Despite the abundance of publicly available remote sensing images, very few remote sensing (RS) images are labeled and even fewer are multi-captioned.These scarcities limit the scope of fine tuned state of the art models to at most 38 classes, based on the PatternNet data, one of the largest publicly available labeled RS data. Recent state-of-the art image-to-image retrieval and detection models in RS have shown great results. Because the text-to-image retrieval of RS images is still emerging, it still faces some challenges in the retrieval of those images.These challenges are based on the inaccurate retrieval of image categories that were not present in the training dataset and the retrieval of images from descriptive input. Motivated by those shortcomings in current cross-modal remote sensing image retrieval, we proposed CLIP-RS, a cross-modal remote sensing image retrieval platform. Our proposed framework CLIP-RS is a framework that combines a fine-tuned implementation of a recent state of the art cross-modal and text-based image retrieval model, Contrastive Language Image Pre-training (CLIP) and FAISS (Facebook AI similarity search), a library for efficient similarity search. Our implementation is deployed on a Web App for inference task on text-to-image and image-to-image retrieval of RS images collected via the Mapbox GL JS API. We used the free tier option of the Mapbox GL JS API and took advantage of its raster tiles option to locate the retrieved results on a local map, a combination of the downloaded raster tiles. Other options offered on our platform are: image similarity search, locating an image in the map, view images' geocoordinates and addresses.In this work we also proposed two remote sensing fine-tuned models and conducted a comparative analysis of our proposed models with a different fine-tuned model as well as the zeroshot CLIP model on remote sensing data. / Master of Science / Satellite imagery research used to be an expensive research topic for companies and organizations due to the limited data and compute resources. As the computing power and storage capacity grows exponentially, a large amount of aerial and satellite images are generated and analyzed everyday for various applications. Current technological advancement and extensive data collection by numerous Internet of Things (IOT) devices and platforms have amplified labeled natural images. Such data availability catalyzed the devel- opment and performance of current state-of-the-art image classification and cross-modal models. Despite the abundance of publicly available remote sens- ing images, very few remote sensing (RS) images are labeled and even fewer are multi-captioned.These scarcities limit the scope of fine tuned state of the art models to at most 38 classes, based on the PatternNet data,one of the largest publicly avail- able labeled RS data.Recent state-of-the art image-to-image retrieval and detection models in RS have shown great results. Because the text-to-image retrieval of RS images is still emerging, it still faces some challenges in the re- trieval of those images.These challenges are based on the inaccurate retrieval of image categories that were not present in the training dataset and the re- trieval of images from descriptive input. Motivated by those shortcomings in current cross-modal remote sensing image retrieval, we proposed CLIP-RS, a cross-modal remote sensing image retrieval platform.Cross-modal retrieval focuses on data retrieval across different modalities and in the context of this work, we focus on textual and imagery modalities.Our proposed frame- work CLIP-RS is a framework that combines a fine-tuned implementation of a recent state of the art cross-modal and text-based image retrieval model, Contrastive Language Image Pre-training (CLIP) and FAISS (Facebook AI similarity search), a library for efficient similarity search. In deep learning, the concept of fine tuning consists of using weights from a different model or algorithm into a similar model with different domain specific application. Our implementation is deployed on a Web Application for inference tasks on text-to-image and image-to-image retrieval of RS images collected via the Mapbox GL JS API. We used the free tier option of the Mapbox GL JS API and took advantage of its raster tiles option to locate the retrieved results on a local map, a combination of the downloaded raster tiles. Other options offered on our platform are: image similarity search, locating an image in the map, view images' geocoordinates and addresses.In this work we also pro- posed two remote sensing fine-tuned models and conducted a comparative analysis of our proposed models with a different fine-tuned model as well as the zeroshot CLIP model on remote sensing data. Detection models in RS have shown great results. Because the text-to-image retrieval of RS images is still emerging, it still faces some challenges in the re- trieval of those images.These challenges are based on the inaccurate retrieval of image categories that were not present in the training dataset and the re- trieval of images from descriptive input. Motivated by those shortcomings in current cross-modal remote sensing image retrieval, we proposed CLIP-RS, a cross-modal remote sensing image retrieval platform.Cross-modal retrieval focuses on data retrieval across different modalities and in the context of this work, we focus on textual and imagery modalities.Our proposed frame- work CLIP-RS is a framework that combines a fine-tuned implementation of a recent state of the art cross-modal and text-based image retrieval model, Contrastive Language Image Pre-training (CLIP) and FAISS (Facebook AI similarity search), a library for efficient similarity search. In deep learning, the concept of fine tuning consists of using weights from a different model or algorithm into a similar model with different domain specific application. Our implementation is deployed on a Web Application for inference tasks on text-to-image and image-to-image retrieval of RS images collected via the Mapbox GL JS API. We used the free tier option of the Mapbox GL JS API and took advantage of its raster tiles option to locate the retrieved results on a local map, a combination of the downloaded raster tiles. Other options offered on our platform are: image similarity search, locating an image in the map, view images' geocoordinates and addresses.In this work we also pro- posed two remote sensing fine-tuned models and conducted a comparative analysis of our proposed models with a different fine-tuned model as well as the zeroshot CLIP model on remote sensing data.

Databases are all around us, and ensuring their efficiency is of great importance. Database optimisation has many parts and many methods, two of these parts are database tuning and database optimisation. These can then further be split into methods such as indexing. These indexing techniques have been studied and compared between Database Management Systems (DBMSs) to see how much they can improve the execution time for queries. And many guides have been written on how to implement query optimisation and indexes. In this thesis, the question "How does indexing and query optimisation affect response time in PostgreSQL?" is posed, and was answered by investigating these previous studies and theory to find different optimisation techniques and compare them to each other. The purpose of this research was to provide more information about how optimisation techniques can be implemented and map out when what method should be used. This was partly done to provide learning material for students, but also people who are starting to learn PostgreSQL. This was done through a literature study, and an experiment performed on a database with different table sizes to see how the optimisation scales to larger systems. What was found was that there are many use cases to optimisation that mainly depend on the query performed and the type of data. From both the literature study and the experiment, the main take-away points are that indexes can vastly improve performance, but if used incorrectly can also slow it. The main use cases for indexes are for short queries and also for queries using spatio-temporal data - although spatio-temporal data should be researched more. Using the DBMS optimiser did not show any difference in execution time for queries, while correctly implemented query tuning techniques also vastly improved execution time. The main use cases for query tuning are for long queries and nested queries. Although, most systems benefit from some sort of query tuning, as it does not have to cost much in terms of memory or CPU cycles, in comparison to how indexes add additional overhead and need some memory. Implementing proper optimisation techniques could improve both costs, and help with environmental sustainability by more effectively utilising resources. / Databaser finns överallt omkring oss, och att ha effektiva databaser är mycket viktigt. Databasoptimering har många olika delar, varav två av dem är databasjustering och SQL optimering. Dessa två delar kan även delas upp i flera metoder, så som indexering. Indexeringsmetoder har studerats tidigare, och även jämförts mellan DBMS (Database Management System), för att se hur mycket ett index kan förbättra prestanda. Det har även skrivits många böcker om hur man kan implementera index och SQL optimering. I denna kandidatuppsats ställs frågan "Hur påverkar indexering och SQL optimering prestanda i PostgreSQL?". Detta besvaras genom att undersöka tidigare experiment och böcker, för att hitta olika optimeringstekniker och jämföra dem med varandra. Syftet med detta arbete var att implementera och kartlägga var och när dessa metoder kan användas, för att hjälpa studenter och folk som vill lära sig om PostgreSQL. Detta gjordes genom att utföra en litteraturstudie och ett experiment på en databas med olika tabell storlekar, för att kunna se hur dessa metoder skalas till större system. Resultatet visar att det finns många olika användingsområden för optimering, som beror på SQL-frågor och datatypen i databasen. Från både litteraturstudien och experimentet visade resultatet att indexering kan förbättra prestanda till olika grader, i vissa fall väldigt mycket. Men om de implementeras fel kan prestandan bli värre. De huvudsakliga användingsområdena för indexering är för korta SQL-frågor och för databaser som använder tid- och rum-data - dock bör tid- och rum-data undersökas mer. Att använda databassystemets optimerare visade ingen förbättring eller försämring, medan en korrekt omskrivning av en SQL fråga kunde förbättra prestandan mycket. The huvudsakliga användingsområdet för omskriving av SQL-frågor är för långa SQL-frågor och för nestlade SQL-frågor. Dock så kan många system ha nytta av att skriva om SQL-frågor för prestanda, eftersom att det kan kosta väldigt lite när det kommer till minne och CPU. Till skillnad från indexering som behöver mer minne och skapar så-kallad överhead". Att implementera optimeringstekniker kan förbättra både driftkostnad och hjälpa med hållbarhetsutveckling, genom att mer effektivt använda resuser.